Computer Club: HP Pavilion Case Study

This is one of the most common scenarios in today's middle-class America; that of the old family PC gift. There are literally scores of machine like this sitting in the closets, attics and garages of suburbia. They can be HP, Dell, Acer..... the brand matters little. They are very much like this one; 2, 3 maybe 4 generations old. They are consumer machines that sell by brand recognition and whichever is shinier/cooler looking than the others on the shelves of Best Buy and Walmart. These aren't bad machine, they're just limited and in today's world of 5th, 6th generation "Core" computers, they are basically "on their last legs". However, this is what one of my students brought in today. So lets take a look at it and see what we can do with it.

 

At the center of this machine is the LGA-775 and in it sits the Intel Core2Quad Q6600. This motherboard engenders some givens.

Four sockets that take DDR2 memory of 667Mhz spec. As typical of memory from this era, there's a chipset limitation of 8Gb total. It also means a full complement of 6 SATA sockets. Along with the obvious limitations, there are also some opportunities as well.

What about the most important part; the graphics sub-system? This machine came equipped with the nVidia GeForce 8500GT. For that day and age, it wasn't "bad" equipment. Far from it! But for today, it's barely adequate to run YouTube videos, but certainly not games of today. So.... what to do?

I would do this, in the following order:

• I'd start with the drive situation; buying as much SSD as my budget will allow. That'd probably something in the 256Gb range. Not huge, but big enough to hold a reload of the OS and the important software.This will do more than anything to make the machine run like something much newer.

  

• Then, I'd move on to this; a new graphics card. I'd do something along the lines of the nVidia GTX650, or an AMD equivalent. Something giving modern graphics ability, but not requiring additional power. 

That's it. Really...... that's all I'd do. The machine already has 4Gb of RAM in it (occupying all it's memory sockets), so in order to add more, it would require losing at least 2Gb. I'll probably advise my student to not bother with the RAM unless he has extra money or happens to come across a great deal on 8Gb of DDR2 memory.  It's really a pretty easy case. The hard part will be to save up his money to do a true full-on build!